SpaceX’s Gigabay project is moving from spectacle to structure. On Roberts Road in Florida, the roof is going on, while the cranes that dominated the site are already gone; in Texas, the company’s second Gigabay is still climbing fast at Starbase, where it has reached the height of the nearby Megabay. The two builds are the latest sign that Starship’s production system is becoming as ambitious as the rocket itself.
That matters because Gigabay is not just another hangar with a flashy name. Elon Musk has said the building is designed to support production of ”a thousand Starship per year,” which would put SpaceX in a different league from any current launch provider. For comparison, the company carried out 5 test launches of the full Starship system in 2025, so the gap between testing cadence and mass production is still wide – and that is exactly the point of all this steel and concrete.
Florida’s Gigabay is already at the roofing stage
The clearest signal comes from Roberts Road, where observer Julia Bergeron says the informal race between the two sites has effectively reached a milestone. The Florida complex has advanced to roof installation, and the large cranes that handled earlier assembly work are no longer on site. That usually means a build is moving out of the loud, photogenic phase and into the less dramatic part: finishing the shell and getting ready for operations.
For SpaceX, that timing is convenient. The company has spent years proving it can build and test Starship hardware at speed, but the real bottleneck is turning experimental rockets into something closer to an industrial product line. NASA and Blue Origin are both watching that transition closely, because the moment SpaceX can manufacture and refurbish at scale, the competitive gap stops being about launches alone.
Starbase is still racing ahead in Texas
Across the Gulf, the Texas Gigabay is not slowing down either. It has now grown to roughly the height of the neighboring Megabay, according to recent observations, making the structure a new giant on the Starbase skyline. The photos released from the site underline the same message SpaceX has been sending for months: Starship is being treated less like a prototype and more like an industrial program.
- Roberts Road, Florida: roof installation has started
- Starbase, Texas: construction is continuing rapidly and has reached Megabay height
- Gigabay target: infrastructure for building and servicing Starship at scale
Mechazilla work shows the rest of the system is changing too
The buildout is happening alongside other upgrades at Starbase. SpaceX is also removing the older section of the Mechazilla tower with a Liebherr LR11000 crawler crane, while testing newer ship and booster hardware, installing engines, checking the water-cooling system, and preparing launch areas for future flights. In other words, the company is rebuilding the factory, the pad, and the catch tower at the same time, which is either impressive planning or a very expensive habit.
The open question now is how quickly the new buildings turn into actual throughput. Gigabay may eventually become the backbone of a high-volume Starship program, but the real benchmark is not the size of the hangar. It is whether SpaceX can convert all that vertical ambition into a launch rhythm that looks anything like the production numbers Musk keeps talking about.